November 09, 2005

I just saw the picture of Kelly Slater surfing. I will have to paint it.

posted by thesportsartist at 10:22 PM on November 09, 2005

Hey, and thesportsartist, where can we see your work?

posted by owlhouse at 12:06 AM on November 10, 2005

haha. i was just voted cutest in my highschool. not to make u feel old or anything. /the cute kid. i think slater should open his own surfing school for minorities, delinquents, or downtrodden youth. it might contribute to the populairity of the sport. and then we can finally get off of the topic of having a lack of diversity in the sport.

posted by 15yroldkid at 02:52 AM on November 10, 2005

also by the way Kelly Congradulations on #7

posted by wargator at 04:32 AM on November 10, 2005

Two words, actually four (or 3.5?): pre-hep Pam Anderson. JJ, r u serious? about the mean toothy creature? If so, please regale us with the tale.

posted by garfield at 09:43 AM on November 10, 2005

having the end of my board bitten off by something with a lot of teeth Whoa, JJ! Like garfield, I want to know the story. It doesn't involve Liz Hurley or Divine Brown this time, does it?

posted by owlhouse at 02:26 PM on November 10, 2005

First time I ever surfed was near Hermanus (a couple of hours east of Cape Town) in South Africa in 1998. It's rare to get sharks near the beach we were at apparently, but then it's not every day they get served up lanky Irish idiots. As Weedy pointed out more eloquently than I ever could, "surfing is crazy hard". I only realised this (and that I really wasn't any good at it, and that the waves were really too big for a first timer) much too late. I'd more or less decided to call it a day and head back into the beach. If I caught a wave, great, but I wasn't going out of my way to make that happen and was just paddling in. I'd been seeing shadows in the waves all day (even from the beach). The people I was with said they were just seals playing in the waves - or possibly dophins. But I come from the generation of children who were allowed to watch Jaws at too young an age, so as I paddled in and saw what looked like an enormous shadow (the water magnifies everything, but still) drift past below me, I started hearing the cello music. Cleverly, I decided to paddle faster, which obviously caught the attention of whatever was casting the shadow, which turned back towards me. I looked behind me and saw there was a wave coming. When I looked back down, the shadow had disappeared. This was a relief and terrifying at the same time. Just as the wave came and I paddled to try and catch the break (which I missed by a mile). Something with a lot of teeth hit the front right side of my board with its mouth wide open. I was lucky in that, the way I was padling my arms, my right arm was almost behind me. Had I been at a different part in the stroke, my hand might have been involved (or "committed" as Martina Navratalova would have it). I don't know what type of shark it was, but it certainly wasn't a great white or anything as exciting as that. It was pretty small (I'd guess about half my height, but I only really saw it's mouth to be honest). All I remember is a flash of teeth and a spintering noise as four or five inches was ripped off the front of my board. Whether it was shock or some deeper remembrance of what one is supposed to do gleaned from a morbid fascination with shark attack documentaries, I froze completely. The only moving part of me was my head which frantically bobbed from side to side trying to see if there was anything under the water beneath me. Another wave came and snapped me out of my frozen state as it pushed me closer the the break. Something switched on in my head and I paddled like no man has ever paddled before. In my mind, I was like a catroon character almost running on top of the water. When I got back to the beach, my (South African) friends' reactions were envious rather than concerned. The guy whose board had been bitten seemed positively delighted. I was back in South Africa at the start of this year, staying again in Hermanus. I was tempted by the great white cage dive, as much as a means of facing the fear as anything else. In the end, I got as far as calling and booking myself in, but later bottled out and cancelled. It wasn't until I got home to Oxford that I discovered that the trip I had been booked on ended like this. I'm not overly fond of swimming in the sea anyway, so it's not entirely the experience with the bitten board's fault that I've hardly dipped a toe in it since, but it would be fatuous to claim that I wasn't bothered by it. As a footnote, I met a guy in Durban a few weeks after it happened who was on crutches. He had a t-shirt with a picture of a great white on it and the slogan "It only hurts if you survive!" Turns out he was on crutches because he had seventy-five stitches in his left leg from testing that theory. "I suppose that's it for you and surfing then?" I said, I thought stating the obvious. "Fuck no, man!" he beamed "I've already been back out on the paddle board, but I figure I should wait until I can stand up without the crutches before I surf again." It's a strange country.

posted by JJ at 06:21 AM on November 11, 2005

Comes with the nationality.

posted by JJ at 10:59 AM on November 12, 2005